ING Make Innovation “Business as Usual”

To truly unleash an organization’s full innovation potential, everyone needs to be involved. ING has the Innovation Lab focussing on creating propositions beyond traditional banking products by incubating and accelerating homegrown B2B startups.

To bring everyone on the innovation journey, Suzanne Charlotte Vos focussed more on making innovation “business as usual” and spread the innovation mindset and ways of working to the rest of the company. She joined forces with Aga Gajownik, Agile Coach and Social Entrepreneur, to create and implement the strategy around running innovation projects across the organisation. Aga brought her experience in agile methodologies, programme development and experiential learning.

Key Points and Challenges

The existing innovation methodologies were developed for creating startups in a highly uncertain environment with a dedicated team. Innovating in business units is different. The main challenge encountered here was to translate the innovation approach from the Lab to the rest of the organisation, ensuring broad adoption of innovation practices and mindset.

As Suzanne explains: “Innovation is often perceived as something intangible, which makes it difficult to communicate impact. To most people innovation is also something that has to be big and disruptive, making it far removed from their day to day work. As a result, the key to broad adoption is making innovation relevant and actionable for everyone in the organisation.

Making Innovation “Business as Usual”

Creating a strategy based on vague objectives is challenging. An agile approach can really help in the process of making it happen. In order to develop a sustainable strategy in collaboration with relevant stakeholders, the following steps were taken:

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